ES6 import using at ('@') sign in path in a vue.js project using Webpack

Question

I'm starting out a new vue.js project so I used the vue-cli tool to scaffold out a new webpack project (i.e. vue init webpack).

As I was walking through the generated files I noticed the following imports in the src/router/index.js file:

import Vue from 'vue'
import Router from 'vue-router'
import Hello from '@/components/Hello' // <- this one is what my qusestion is about

Vue.use(Router)

export default new Router({
    routes: [
        {
            path: '/',
            name: 'Hello',
            component: Hello
        }
    ]
})

I've not seen the at sign (@) in a path before. I suspect it allows for relative paths (maybe?) but I wanted to be sure I understand what it truly does.

I tried searching around online but wasn't able to find an explanation (prob because searching for "at sign" or using the literal character @ doesn't help as search criteria).

What does the @ do in this path (link to documentation would be fantastic) and is this an es6 thing? A webpack thing? A vue-loader thing?

UPDATE

Thanks Felix Kling for pointing me to another duplicate stackoverflow question/answer about this same question.

While the comment on the other stackoverflow post isn't the exact answer to this question (it wasn't a babel plugin in my case) it did point me in the correct direction to find what it was.

In in the scaffolding that vue-cli cranks out for you, part of the base webpack config sets up an alias for .vue files:

This makes sense both in the fact that it gives you a relative path from the src file and it removes the requirement of the .vue at the end of the import path (which you normally need).

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

This is done with Webpack resolve.alias configuration option and isn't specific to Vue.

In Vue Webpack template, Webpack is configured to replace @/ with src path:

  const path = require('path');

  ...
  resolve: {
    extensions: ['.js', '.vue', '.json'],
    alias: {
      ...
      '@': path.resolve('src'),
    }
  },
  ...

The alias is used as:

import '@/<path inside src folder>';